Ahh, peeing in bed. Many of us have unpleasant memories of doing it as children, and no doubt many of you have been woken to change the sheets after one of your children let loose his or her bladder while deep asleep. There are plenty of reasons why kids wet the bed, but now scientists have discovered that there's something which could be causing a lot of this night-leaking that never occurred to anyone before: constipation. As odd as it sounds, the study, which was published in the journal Urology, found it played a big role:

[T]he 30 children and adolescents who sought treatment for bed-wetting all had large amounts of stool in their rectums, despite the majority having normal bowel habits.

What an unpleasant thought—though it's good somebody bothered to think about it at all, because treating the kids with laxatives made a huge difference:

After treatment with laxative therapy, 83 percent of the study participants were cured of bed-wetting within three months.

Holy crap. Of course it's too late for most of us to benefit from this tip, but perhaps if you're children are going through a bed-wetting phase you can use this knowledge to spare them the middle of the night pajama changes that generations before them have endured. Just be careful to time the laxatives right, because the only thing worse than waking up in a pool of your own urine is spending all night awake on the toilet.